One small slice of bread, one giant leap for toasters.
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Category Archives: Art
A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer
Fused deposition machines are an interesting class of rapid prototyping and art robots, capable of extruding paint onto a canvas or extruding to build up complex, three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. Naturally, one of the challenging parts of designing machines like these is designing and building a system for dispensing the printing medium. So, imagine how surprised we were when we were walking through the aisles of our local Michaels craft store and saw a pre-built extruder on the shelf for $20!
Naturally, we picked one up because an extruder head might make a nice accessory for our own three dimensional printer.
So, what is it? It’s an inexpensive kit that can be used for developing your 2D or 3D printer extruder with an air-powered delivery system. For the price you can get a small air pump, tubing, syringes, tips, and dispenser. The components are simple and easily hackable, and it looks like a good set of tools for starting to build a simple extruder head for an art bot of some sort.
Quite mysteriously, this kit is not actually advertised as an arbitrary material extruder kit, but rather as “the ultimate fabric painter.” This is very strange because not only does the kit not include any fabric paint, but it’s not obvious that there’s any advantage whatsoever to painting fabric with this method. (Actually, if the picture on the front of the box is any indication, there may even be disadvantages!)
Continue reading A $20 hackable extruder for your artbot or 3D printer
Glenn’s Mosaic Table
Glenn made this very awesome mosaic table, influenced by our Mixed-Media Mosaic Dining Table. In the table are neatly broken tiles, marbles, dice, broken tourist-trap commemorative plate shards, and other interesting goodies. =)
Here’s a close up of some of the materials he used. There are more pictures in his project set on flickr.
PS: Glenn was kind enough to add these photos to the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary flickr photo pool. If you’ve got pictures that are (at least marginally) related to posts and projects on evilmadscientist, add them to that group, and they’ll appear now and then in the Evil Mad Science Auxiliary flickr photo badge on the right hand side of this page.
Duplex cookie games
Duplex cookies bring a whole new level of literalness to the phrase “playing with your food.” These two-toned sandwich cookies beg to be used for board games such as Othello and checkers (or Go, if you have a lot of cookies). All you need are cookies, a large piece of paper and a pen.
We made a stop-motion video of a few minutes of playing games with the cookies, Check it out on youtube or watch it embedded here:
Meringue peeps round-up
Last week we showed you how to make your own Meringue Chicks.
Since then, a few brave souls have tried it out and posted pictures of their own homemade Pseudo-Peeps. You can see some photos at
Assorted Notions and in the Recipe Maven community, who also show off some interesting meringue bunnies. Speaking of assorted meringue animals, we might have to make these silly snails next time.
It’s fairly off-topic, but while browsing pictures of Peeps on flickr this week, we also came across this reminder (NSFPL – not safe for peep lovers) of what’s in regular old peeps. We’ll stick to meringue, thanks.
[Related @ evilmadscientist: Pretzel Snails, Play with your food]
Making Tiramatzah
Tiramatzah is a tasty and seasonal variation on a classic dessert: tiramisu made with many layers of matzah bread. Because it’s made with many thin layers of matzah instead of just a couple of layers of ladyfingers, it develops a very interesting flaky and layered texture, much like the alternating custard and pastry layers of a Napoleon. Even so, it retains the distinctive flavor of tiramisu and is a darned sight easier to make than traditional pastries.
More cool dessert sushi
Dot wrote in with this photo of some beautiful dessert sushi that she made (link).
The “fish” pieces are primarily pieces of dried fruit– a brilliant (and healthier) alternative to our all candy version. She also included some tips for future sushi endeavors, all of which sound like good points:
- Yogos fruit rolls come in green and seem to work well for seaweed, though not as pretty green as fruit rollups.
- Dried papaya, sliced, looks like Tuna! We also used dried mango and candied ginger for our ‘fish’.
- A tomato paste can is a good size to be a cookie cutter to cut out the round ‘slices’ and we just put slices of the fruit on to to similate the effect of a roll.
Neat stuff– we’ll have to include dried papayas in our next batch of sushi!
[Related: Dessert Sushi]
Saffron Meringue Chicks
Marshmallow Peeps have an amazing cult following, and it’s no wonder why: they are cute, abstract, colorful, ubiquitous, and sugary. While it sometimes seems that the entire human race is firmly in favor of performing cruel experiments on them, there is a little less consensus on whether or not one should actually eat them. Both sides of the aisle have their merits, of course, and more often than not the debate is merely over whether fresh or stale peeps are tastier. All debating aside, here’s a gourmet option for fans of Peeps that prefer to stuff their gizzards with something other than mass-produced marshmallows: Saffron Meringue Chicks!
Continue reading Saffron Meringue Chicks
Play with your food: Rework your toast
It’s a simple formula, really: hot air gun + bread = interesting toast.
Continue reading Play with your food: Rework your toast
An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display
What do you get when you mix a 1970’s style analog chart recorder, an 8-bit microcontroller, and a Fisher-Price Doodle Pro? A truly 21st century toy: An analog PlotBot with e-paper display technology!
Continue reading An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display
